Mordovian Hour

On 1 May 2007, Voina staged a celebration of International Workers' Day, entitled Mordovian Hour, by throwing live cats over the counters at the McDonald's restaurant at Serpukhovskaya, Moscow, "to break up the drudgery of workers' routine day".^[1] This was a combined project with the Bombily art group. The action was witnessed by two plain-clothes police, who arrested Pyotr Verzilov and kept two cats as evidence. Charges against Verzilov were eventually dropped.^[10]

Feast

On 24 August 2007, Voina conducted a wake for absurdist poet Dmitry Prigov, featuring a table with food and vodka, in a Moscow Metro car. Originally, they had planned an action involving Prigov but he died before they were able to implement it. They later carried out a similar action on the Kyiv Metro.^[10]

Fuck for the heir Puppy Bear!

Voina came to widespread public attention with Fuck for the heir Puppy Bear!, staged on 29 February 2008, the day before the election of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Five couples had public sex in Moscow's Timiryazev State Museum of Biology. Two of the performers were Vera Kondakova and Alexandre Karpenko. While there were no immediate legal repercussions, several participants faced disciplinary action by the philosophy department of Moscow University.^[6]

Alexei Plutser-Sarno, a linguist and author of a dictionary of Russian Mat (profanity) participated in this action in a minor capacity, and wrote about it in a detailed if somewhat fanciful blog post.^[11] Although he criticised the action for its lack of originality (similar actions had previously been staged by other Russian performance art groups), he was soon accepted as a full member of Voina, becoming their chief "media officer" and documenting the group's activities on his blog.^[12]

Humiliation of a Cop in his House

On 6 May 2008 Voina activists, entered a small police station in Bolshevo near Moscow. They hung a portrait of Dmitri Medvedev on the prison bars, and hung posters with phrases such as "Kill the immigrants" and "Abandon hope all ye who enter here". They then formed a human pyramid, and recited Prigov poems.^[6]

Cop in a Priest's Cassock

On 3 July 2008 Oleg Vorotnikov wore the robe of a Russian Orthodox priest and the hat of a police officer, entered a supermarket, then left without paying for a full cart of groceries, to demonstrate the "invulnerability" of these groups.^[6][13]

In Memory of the Decembrists

On 7 September 2008, to protest homophobic and racist comments by Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, Voina staged a mock-hanging of two homosexual men and three Central Asian guest workers^[6][14] in a department store in Moscow. The title of the piece references the Decembrist revolt, an 1825 military uprising against Emperor Nicholas I of Russia. Some members of the group held a sign saying "Nobody gives a fuck about Pestel", a reference to the executed Decembrist leader Pavel Pestel.

Later, in 2012, Putin used this action in his response to Angela Merkel's criticism on the Pussy Riot case. He accused the participants of "anti-Semitism" and claimed that they "said that we need to get rid of such people in Moscow".^[15] Writing at the Echo of Moscow website, gay activist Oleg Vasilyev identified himself as the Jewish man who was mock-executed. He flatly rejected Putin's version of events, saying that "practically everything about this statement is untrue". He also said that Jews were not even mentioned during the action itself, only in Plutser-Sarno's blog post, Plutser-Sarno himself being Jewish.^[16]

The Storming of the White House

On the night of 6–7 November 2008, Voina gained access to a room in the attic of the Hotel Ukraina, across from the Russian White House building, seat of the Government of the Russian Federation. Using subterfuge, they brought an enormous laser projector into the hotel. They became trapped with the projector in an elevator, but broke through the ceiling, and disabled its door mechanism. The equipment was used to project a skull and crossbones, 12 stories tall, onto the facade of the White House building. Meanwhile, other activists staged a "storming" of the building, by scaling the 8-meter iron gates in front of it.^[17]

The Banning of the Clubs

On 28 December 2008, members of Voina welded shut the entrance doors of the restaurant Oprichnik, using an acetylene torch and metal sheets.^[18] A message was left at the scene: "For the security of our citizens, the doors of the elite club Oprichnik have been reinforced".

Dick in the Ass – Punk Concert in the Courtroom

In May 2009, Voina members interrupted a courtroom hearing for the director of the Andrei Sakharov Museum and Public Center, which was being held in Moscow. They billed themselves as a punk band called "Dick in the Ass" and performed a song, "All Cops are Bаstards, Remember This", using instruments and a small amplifier which they had smuggled into the courtroom. The performance lasted less than two minutes as they were soon removed by security forces.^[14][19]

Dick Captured by the FSB

During the night of 14 June 2010, Voina painted a giant 65 m long phallus on the surface of the Liteyny drawbridge leading to the Bolshoy Dom, headquarters of the Federal Security Service in Saint Petersburg.^[26] This painting was entitled Giant Galactic Space Penis. The group studied traffic patterns at the bridge, and practiced coordinated actions for two weeks beforehand, in a parking lot, because they would have only 30 seconds to complete the painting before the drawbridge was raised.

How to Snatch a Chicken

On 20 July 2010, Voina staged one of their more notorious actions in the Nakhodka supermarket in St. Petersburg. A female Voina activist nicknamed "Vacuous Cunt With Inconceivably Huge Tits"^[27] removed a chicken from the refrigerated section of the supermarket, then laboriously stuffed the entire chicken into her own vagina, while being filmed by other Voina members. She then shoplifted the chicken by leaving the supermarket without paying, with the chicken still inserted, and rejoined activists outside the store.^[28] The activists held signs spelling out the word "bezblyadno", which translates roughly as "without whoring", a reference to the group's rejection of paid employment and preference for stealing food, and a pun on the word besplatno, "free (of charge)". (This stunt has sometimes been incorrectly attributed to Pussy Riot).

Palace Coup

On 20 September 2010, members of Voina overturned a police car by rocking it from side to side, on the pretext of retrieving a football for Vorotnikov and Sokol's son Kasper.^[29]

Cops Auto-da-fe, or Fucking Prometheus

In a more drastic and destructive turn of events, on 31 December 2011, Voina committed an arson attack in St. Petersburg, in which a police paddy wagon vehicle was destroyed.^{[30] [31]} On New Year's Eve a police station was broken into, and Molotov cocktails were used to destroy the vehicle. Voina spokesman Plutser-Sarno wrote in a statement: "Understand that this is not art, it is action which is beyond artistic. This will be our bonfire of the vanities".

Cockroach Court

On 12 July 2010, Yuri Samodurov and Andrei Erofeev, curators of the exhibition "Forbidden Art 2006", were being sentenced in the Tagansky Courthouse, Moscow, on charges of "inciting religious hatred". The conservative Orthodox group "People's Synod" had objected to exhibits which depicted Mickey Mouse and Lenin as Jesus Christ.

Members of Voina entered the court building, intending to release approximately 3500 live Madagascan giant cockroaches. It is not clear to what extent they succeeded. The process of raising and collecting the roaches is documented,^[32] but no photographic evidence from inside the courthouse has been released. Activist Yekaterina Samutsevich, among those who planned to infiltrate the court with insects, was later prosecuted in the same courtroom, before being sentenced to probation in the Pussy Riot trial.^[21][33]

Operation: Kiss Garbage

In January and February 2011, Voina enacted a series of provocations in Moscow public areas, entitled Operation: Kiss Garbage (Russian: "Лобзай мусора", roughly translated as "Kiss a Pig"). In Russian, the word musor (literally: 'garbage') is derogatory slang for "police officer", similar to the English "pig". The action consisted of female activists approaching and kissing policewomen without warning or consent; took place in the subway stations and on the streets.^[34] It was done as an anticipatory protest of the New Law on Police signed by President Medvedev, which went into effect on 1 March 2011. ^[35]

Pussy Riot

The group Pussy Riot was formed in August 2011, and included Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Pyotr Verzilov, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, members of the Moscow faction of Voina.^[36][37]